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#504 - 28 Days Later...
Danny Boyle, 2002
A young man wakes up from a coma to find that England has suffered a viral epidemic that renders people murderously insane.
I was surprised to find myself underwhelmed by this film the first time I watched it. Even so, it still had enough quality to it that I sort of liked it and did not mind giving it a second chance, and give it a second chance I did. Of course, having gotten a lot more critical in the intervening years probably wouldn't do it any favours. The early scenes are full of this, whether it's the incompetence of everyone involved in the laboratory prologue that leads to the virus getting released in the first place or the fact that the film's protagonist (Cillian Murphy) even manages to wake up from a coma in an empty hospital in the first place and doesn't encounter so much as a single dead body as he wanders through a desolate London. This soon gives way to a film that tries to offer a somewhat serious take on zombie movies (specifics be damned) but it is that same attempt to be serious that does undercut it somewhat. While the first half does guarantee some striking imagery of an empty world that is occasionally plagued by red-eyed monsters, it also results in a rather flabby middle as Murphy and a more experienced survivor (Naomie Harris) team up with a father and daughter (Brendan Gleeson and Megan Burns respectively) to try to survive together by heading towards a remote broadcast signal, which does result in strong attempts at character-building but not in any sufficiently meaningful way.
While the film has drawn some flack for its third act involving the main group of survivors meeting a platoon of soldiers who are holed up in a mansion, by this point in the film it's a welcome change of pace from the extremely repetitive zombie-survival structure of the rest of the film (even if it does feel like a somewhat derivative and condensed version of Day of the Dead). Arguably, that's the main flaw with 28 Days Later... - despite the insistence on the enemies in this film not technically being zombies and the maintaining of an unusual visual aesthetic thanks to the frantic documentarian style provided by digital video, it struggles to actually provide a decent enough plot. Characters give us just enough reason to care whether they live or die and little else beyond that, even though there are some decent actors in the mix. I can also appreciate the musical choices - playing Godspeed You! Black Emperor over post-apocalyptic scenery is one of the most appropriate marriages of sound and vision possible, while the music that plays during the film's finale gets under one's skin in the best way. Of course, without a sufficiently solid core on which to build things these little moments and the technical quality that goes into them, the film's quality ultimately comes across as a little haphazard and thus I don't feel like I generally liked it. A bit of tightening things up could have done this film some serious good.
Addendum: I don't think this was on the DVD version that I first watched, but this time I watched the film on TV and the ending was different for some reason:
Danny Boyle, 2002
A young man wakes up from a coma to find that England has suffered a viral epidemic that renders people murderously insane.
I was surprised to find myself underwhelmed by this film the first time I watched it. Even so, it still had enough quality to it that I sort of liked it and did not mind giving it a second chance, and give it a second chance I did. Of course, having gotten a lot more critical in the intervening years probably wouldn't do it any favours. The early scenes are full of this, whether it's the incompetence of everyone involved in the laboratory prologue that leads to the virus getting released in the first place or the fact that the film's protagonist (Cillian Murphy) even manages to wake up from a coma in an empty hospital in the first place and doesn't encounter so much as a single dead body as he wanders through a desolate London. This soon gives way to a film that tries to offer a somewhat serious take on zombie movies (specifics be damned) but it is that same attempt to be serious that does undercut it somewhat. While the first half does guarantee some striking imagery of an empty world that is occasionally plagued by red-eyed monsters, it also results in a rather flabby middle as Murphy and a more experienced survivor (Naomie Harris) team up with a father and daughter (Brendan Gleeson and Megan Burns respectively) to try to survive together by heading towards a remote broadcast signal, which does result in strong attempts at character-building but not in any sufficiently meaningful way.
While the film has drawn some flack for its third act involving the main group of survivors meeting a platoon of soldiers who are holed up in a mansion, by this point in the film it's a welcome change of pace from the extremely repetitive zombie-survival structure of the rest of the film (even if it does feel like a somewhat derivative and condensed version of Day of the Dead). Arguably, that's the main flaw with 28 Days Later... - despite the insistence on the enemies in this film not technically being zombies and the maintaining of an unusual visual aesthetic thanks to the frantic documentarian style provided by digital video, it struggles to actually provide a decent enough plot. Characters give us just enough reason to care whether they live or die and little else beyond that, even though there are some decent actors in the mix. I can also appreciate the musical choices - playing Godspeed You! Black Emperor over post-apocalyptic scenery is one of the most appropriate marriages of sound and vision possible, while the music that plays during the film's finale gets under one's skin in the best way. Of course, without a sufficiently solid core on which to build things these little moments and the technical quality that goes into them, the film's quality ultimately comes across as a little haphazard and thus I don't feel like I generally liked it. A bit of tightening things up could have done this film some serious good.
Addendum: I don't think this was on the DVD version that I first watched, but this time I watched the film on TV and the ending was different for some reason:
WARNING: "28 Days Later..." spoilers below
After playing the ending I remembered - where the heroic characters all survive the events at the mansion and manage to attract the attention of a patroling aircraft - there was an intertitle that read "what if..." and that then played a sequence where Harris and Burns worked to save Murphy, but their attempts were unsuccessful and this screening apparently ended with the two of them walking off into the unknown. Though the happy ending does stretch credulity with how sudden and optimistic it is, ending it with a morbidly realistic ending somehow feels worse despite matching the despair-laden tone of the rest of the film, and the idea of grafting it onto the original ending is a terrible one. This isn't Clue, dammit.